


Seeing Things

by Eowyn315



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-03
Updated: 2011-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-22 04:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eowyn315/pseuds/Eowyn315
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xander is "the one who sees everything." What does he see when he looks at Spike?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeing Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sevendeadlyfun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendeadlyfun/gifts).



> Thanks to Slaymesoftly and Clawofcat for betaing.

There’s a moment, as the door closes behind Buffy and Dawn, leaving them alone in his apartment, when he wishes he could kill Spike. Just a brief flash of white-hot anger that shudders through him, and he finds himself closing his fist around an imaginary stake.

But then he catches Spike’s gaze, and he hardly recognizes the person he sees. He didn’t think you could _see_ a soul - not the way Anya had, anyway. But there it is, lingering behind Spike’s haunted blue eyes. A cliché runs through his head about the eyes being the windows to blah blah blah, but it’s more than that. It’s everywhere – in his slumped shoulders, drooping under the weight of his guilt; in his skittish demeanor, ready to bolt like a frightened rabbit at the first sign of condemnation. Even the absence of the duster speaks to the change, though Xander knows that’s his own fault, for boxing it up and hiding it in the darkest recesses of the high school basement, his very own Pandora’s box of painful emotions and unwanted memories, better kept sealed up tight.

He couldn’t fit Spike in the box, though, and now he’s standing in the living room, the most unwanted houseguest ever in the history of mooching. Except it’s hard to hate him when he looks like that, and Xander wishes he would just… snark or something. Be rude, insulting, inappropriate. Be the Spike he remembered. He’d even settle for the Spike who did a high-pitched Anya impersonation and whined that Xander didn’t care about him. Because he didn’t want to care; he didn’t want to be friends with this Spike, but the longer he shuffled his feet and stared at the floor with his hands shoved in his pockets like the kid who got picked last in gym class, the harder it was to remember that this was the same vampire who’d screwed his girl and tried to rape his best friend.

To be honest, he looks a lot more like the vampire who’d hung around them the summer after Buffy died, the one the Scoobies had grudgingly accepted into their group, the one Xander had always resented just a little bit, because he didn’t fit the mold, because he did things vampires weren’t supposed to do, like fall in love and try to be good and eat spicy buffalo wings. And he made Xander think of Jesse and wonder if maybe he could’ve been the same. If Xander had given him a chance...

But even Spike would say that was foolish, that going around having fuzzy feelings for vampires only made it a lot easier for them to kill you. _Ninety-nine percent of ’em would as soon rip your head off as look at you_ is what he’d told Dawn, whenever she’d get too comfortable and start treating him like the rule rather than the exception.

Except Spike’s not saying anything right now, still just slumping and shuffling and generally making Xander uncomfortable. Mostly because Spike looks like he needs a hug, and Xander is so not even going there.

Really, there’s only one thing he can do.

“Come on,” he says, and Spike’s head snaps up, trying for all the world not to look like he cares, but still with that eager-puppy-love-me thing he does whenever someone unexpectedly pays him some positive attention. “I’ll get you some clean sheets.”


End file.
